


Filling

by NeoVenus22



Category: Pushing Daisies
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:04:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/31998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NeoVenus22/pseuds/NeoVenus22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Chuck leaves, a lonely Ned finally comes to some realizations</p>
            </blockquote>





	Filling

Four months, eight days, twelve hours, and fifty-two minutes after Chuck had left the Pie Hole and her apartment above it, Ned the Pie Maker looked up from his task of inelegantly hacking into a pear, to find Olive Snook, his longest-employed and now solitary waitress, staring at him.

"What?"

"No one should ever feel sad baking a pie," said Olive sagely. "People can taste it, you know, sadness. Doesn't make the pie taste very good."

Olive had recently developed a knack for seeing right into Ned's soul, he privately pondered. Of course it was possible she had always had the gift, and he'd simply never noticed it before now. Whichever the case, it unnerved him greatly. "Maybe you should be making the pies, then."

"I'm just the cute, perky waitress." Olive smiled, as though to demonstrate. "You're the pie artist, Ned! But you're like Picasso - you're in your Blue Period now, and you need to break through and move ahead."

"You want me to make cubist pies?"

Olive stepped close to him and lay her hand over his own flour-dusted one. "I want you to do what you do best." And leaving Ned with that cryptic statement, Olive Snook went back to doing what she did best, charming the customers of the Pie Hole with a slice and a smile. Ned, meanwhile, looked at the spot on his hand where she had touched him, feeling the presence of her fingers still, like a ghost. But this was not the lingering spirit of something dearly departed, which was a sensation he knew all too well. This, rather, was the ghostly apprehension of something unknown.

* * *

Six months, twelve days, fifteen hours, and thirty-six minutes after Charlotte Charles's departure to once again be a tourist, although much less lonely, Ned the Pie Maker sat at a booth in the closed Pie Hole after a long day, and found a piece of pie waiting for him. He looked up to see Olive's expectant smile. "I know you never eat your own pie," she said. "Which I always thought was kinda weird." She half-giggled and settled in the seat across from Ned. "But I figured no one who spends as much time around pie as you do has any capacity to hate pie, so... Made this one myself."

Ned took a grateful bite. The fruit was fresh and did not decay in his mouth, which was a considerable relief. The sensation of rapidly rotting fruit pressed against one's tongue was not, as you might imagine, the most pleasant of sensations. However, this pie was altogether pleasant. The crust was flaky. The temperature was just right. "It's good," he said, an understatement.

"Learned from the best," said Olive, swelled with pride.

It was in that moment that Ned realized, perhaps for the first time since a girl named Chuck had left him behind, that her reasoning for leaving was true in aspects beyond their relationship. Neither Chuck's world, nor the world in general, revolved around Ned. Olive Snook was more than just a presence in his life, she was a source of cheer for the customers, a source of physical affection for Digby, and a source of something for Ned that he could not yet determine. Comfort, perhaps, but it was much more than that. She had been a rock for Ned, long before even Chuck danced her way into the scene.

Olive went about her merry way, shutting down the eatery for the evening. And as bits of berry heated his tongue, down his throat, to warm his chest and stomach and whole person from the inside out, Ned's world stopped.

And started its next revolution on a new axis.

* * *

Two weeks, three days, eight hours, and forty-five minutes after Ned the Pie Maker's feelings started to change, Olive Snook began to see, in the colloquial sense, Alfredo Aldarisio, the traveling homeopathic supplements salesman who'd won her nose and was working on her heart, and Ned began to see, in the literal sense, this very relationship slowly unfolding.

Ned had experienced jealousy in numerous instances in his life, but this instance was tinged with despair, as he knew this was something that could have been his, if only he'd realized it. His hand occasionally burned with the sensory memory of any brief touch she'd inflicted on him, the sort of thing of which no one would take much notice; the traveling salesman, for example, who drank in touches greedily without a level of true appreciation.

Olive giggled at something the salesman said, touched his sleeve, and went to see to her waitressing duties.

Ned debated abusing his rights as an establishment owner, and banning Alfredo Aldarisio from the premises.

"He seems nice," said Ned, as Olive ducked into the kitchen to slice some rhubarb for table five.

"He is," said Olive, "very nice."

"Is he your boyfriend?"

Olive looked up sharply, and the light glinting off the metal pie server in the flesh pie server's hand made it look like a blade. "Does that matter?"

"I don't know," said Ned, "does it?" But no sooner had the words left his mouth than Ned regretted them, for by saying them, he'd unwittingly pushed a giant ball of his emotions and fears off the top of a very steep hill, and now they had no choice but to roll down it, rapidly gaining speed, and barreling towards a destination and a destiny as yet unknown.

"I guess we'll find out," said Olive, picking up her plates, and it was uncertain which question she was answering.

* * *

Five weeks, seven days, fourteen hours, and twenty-nine minutes after Ned the Pie Maker first realized his hopeless longing for his only waitress, Olive Snook was very much the girlfriend of one bearded salesman, who frequented the Pie Hole and never paid much regard to whatever pie he put in his mouth, so long as it came to him on the outstretched palms of a certain blond.

Over the passing weeks, Ned had become masterful in the art of observation, although subtlety was never quite his strong point. Olive, on the other hand, seemed so smitten with the bearded salesman, and he with her, that they never noticed if Ned lurked behind the counter to observe.

Olive touched the man eagerly, Ned noticed with a pang, and not as a conduit or as a replacement for another touch she could not have. Ned could say with certainty that thoughts of him never once crossed her mind as she held Alfredo's hand. Ned thought wistfully of the touches he'd neglected, too consumed with the ones he could never have. It was the nature of man to want the impossible and ignore the existing.

"You seem down in the dumps, Ned," Olive observed one morning, as they readied the pies for delivery.

"Just lost in thought."

"You seem lost in thought a lot these days. Still thinking about Chuck?"

"Sometimes."

"I understand," said Olive. "You still love her."

"Yes," Ned answered, for he felt it was best in this scenario not to lie, even if it wasn't the entire truth.

Olive Snook, for her part, took his honesty in stride. "That's okay, though."

Ned the Pie Maker, for his part, was not expecting Olive to agree so readily. "It is?"

"Sure is. See, the heart is like a pie tin. You can fill it up a hundred different ways from Sunday, but it'll never be filled the same way twice. But the great thing about that is that it can always be refilled."

"I want..." said Ned, but his sentence was as incomplete as his thoughts. He wasn't entirely sure what he wanted. Olive smiled at him, and the simplest of the answers he could come up with was that he wanted Olive to continue smiling at him. He wanted very much to be deserving of her smile, although he suspected he'd lost that gift.

"You'll figure it out, Ned," said Olive with confidence.

The only problem with Olive's statement was that Ned had already figured it out. Both of their pie tins had already been filled. Separately.

And so Ned pined.


End file.
